I've been really pleased with my progress as a newbie, especially with
incorporating my database into displayed tables using the extensions that
this group told me about.
Here are some additional needs/questions that I would appreciate pointers
to from those who've gone before...
1) I'll want to merge the registration for the wiki portion with the
non-wiki existing site. I'm thinking that I need to have all users go
through the wiki registration and then ask them if they want to record the
additional info required for the non-wiki portions. So I'll need to modify
the non-wiki to recognize users that have logged in to the wiki.
2) What is the best way to modify the pages templates? For example, if I
wanted to add a "Donations" link likes WikiPedia's? Or links to the
non-wiki sections? Or display the time in Timbuctoo in the bottom left
corner? Or have a second image randomly selected that morphs out of the
main logo image? Obviously I'm looking for general pointers, not specific
solutions here. (That may come later :] )
3) I've been transferring articles by hand from WikiPedia to my GenWiki,
but am wondering if there's a better way. I've looked at the WikiPedia's
data dump downloads instruction pages, but frankly they don't make it seem
too easy, especially if I'm using a remote web server that I don't admin.
Is this the case? Besides, even if I could magically transfer the data, I'd
need to weed out most of it. Also, the storage space would be a problem
until I weeded. I doubt that it exists, but what would best serve my needs
would be some spider that given a start page, crawls my GenWiki looking for
empty articles and then goes to WikiPedia (using approved behavior of one
page per second, etc) and copies the edit box material and pastes it back
into my GenWiki. It should be configurable to limit the levels of linkage
so that it only drills down to that many links. Given enough time, I can
create such a spider in Perl (but I'm not set up right now, nor am I
proficient in Perl. I played with a couple of years ago.), but wonder if
someone has a better, more immediate solution to point me to.
TIA,
James Birkholz
admin, Posen-L mailing list and website
http://www.Posen-L.com